Shakespeare and Textual Theory

Description

There is no Shakespeare without text. Yet readers often do not realize that the words in the book they hold, like the dialogue they hear from the stage, has been revised, augmented and emended since Shakespeare's lifetime. An essential resource for the history of Shakespeare on the page, Shakespeare and Textual Theory traces the explanatory underpinnings of these changes through the centuries. After providing an introduction to early modern printing practices, Suzanne Gossett describes the original quartos and folios as well as the first collected editions. Subsequent sections summarize the work of the 'New Bibliographers' and the radical challenge to their technical analysis posed by poststructuralist theory, which undermined the presumed stability of author and text. Shakespeare and Textual Theory presents a balanced view of the current theoretical debates, which include the nature of the surviving texts we call Shakespeare's; the relationship of the author 'Shakespeare' and of authorial intentions to any of these texts; the extent and nature of Shakespeare's collaboration with others; and the best or most desirable way to present the texts - in editions or performances. The book is illustrated throughout with examples showing how theoretical decisions affect the text of Shakespeare's plays, and case studies of Hamlet and Pericles demonstrate how different theories complicate both text and meaning, whether a play survives in one version or several. The conclusion summarizes the many ways in which beliefs about Shakespeare's texts have changed over the centuries. Cover Halftitle page Series page Title page Copyright page CONTENTS SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Introduction PART ONE Textual Studies Before ‘Theory’ 1 Shakespeare’s Texts from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century The progress of an early modern play The First Folio Successive Folios Early editions PART TWO Twentieth-Century Theories 2 The New Bibliography 3 The Advent of Poststructuralism 4 Textual and Other Theories PART THREE Current Debates 5 Authorship, Agency, and Intentionality 6 Attribution and Collaboration External evidence Internal evidence Enlarging the canon Theoretical implications 7 The (In)Stability of the Text What if the printer went to lunch? Why are some texts bad? Why – and how and when – do some texts change? 8 Editing and Unediting Editing Shakespeare Editing collaborations Unediting Shakespeare Deciding on intervention 9 Book History and the Text Shakespeare as literary dramatist The creation of ‘Shakespeare’ through books Readers, commonplacers and collectors Women and Shakespeare books Two material texts 10 Performance and the Text Traces of early performance Editing for performance 11 Textual Theories and Difficult Cases: Hamlet and Pericles Shakespeare’s texts and early editions Enter the New Bibliography The challenge of poststructuralism, or authorship, authority, and intention Textual and other theories Attribution and collaboration Printing unstable texts Editing and unediting Book history and the text Performance and the text CODA The Immaterial Text 12 Textual Studies After the Digital Turn REFERENCES INDEX